Manston Airport: Politicians F**k Up Thanet's Recovery

I’m becoming more and more frustrated and angry at having to write  bad news stories about Thanet. Virtually every week I’m posting articles about the grinding  poverty and deprivation faced by many people  in Thanet,  or the fucked-up third rate  health,  education, council and housing services most people in the area have to depend on. But there’s no need for any of this. Thanet is a beautiful place in a beautiful county, with excellent transport links to London which, economically and socially, should be doing one hell of a lot better than it is right now.

So why are things so crap for so many people? Well, I believe  that one of the reasons is that  the unresolved future of Manston Airport has become  a major blockage to  the regeneration of Thanet. Or more precisely,  the way in which the Labour Party, UKIP and the Tories, have manged the Manston Airport  issue is blighting the  regeneration of the district. To be brutally  frank these self-serving so-called politicians have, through their cynical manipulation of the  Manston Airport saga,  seriously fucked up opportunities for  thousands of  local people to have a better life, and they should be ashamed of what they have done.

The subject of Manston Airport has dominated Thanet for over 2 years. In this time The Labour Party, the Tories and UKIP have all tried to exploit this issue for their political advantage.  I have previously exposed how the parties tried to hijack  the Save Manston campaign with hypocritical  promises of a CPO, when they were  (and still are) supporting strategic regeneration plans based on a future without an airport. I explained how, despite their promises, Thanet’s political establishment  knew damn well that there were no compelling legal grounds to successfully secure a CPO. And now with  the recent collapse of the RiverOak deal you would have thought that Labour, UKIP and the  Tories would have stopped playing games, been honest with local  people and said that it’s game over for Manston Airport.

But no. Instead of telling the truth  the manipulative bunch of wankers who  pass themselves off as Thanet’s political leaders  are continuing their campaign of lies and deceit about Manston. Soon after the collapse  of the RiverOak deal a new Save Manston political coalition headed by the Tories, and perhaps soon to be supported by the Labour Party and the Democratic Independent Group,  was  announced. To avoid being politically outflanked by their rivals  UKIP have declared that there are other speculators lurking in the shadows and that it might still possible to save Manston. So scared are Thanet’s politicians of being exposed for their initial deceit and dishonesty over the  airport that, like naughty children, they are trying to disguise one lie with another in the hope that their  cynical abuse of  public trust remains undiscovered.

And what’s the result of this politically inspired  dishonesty about the  Manston Airport situation?  Simple the future of the site is now extremely uncertain with the threat of a potential  CPO hanging over it  possibly for several more  years to come.  Ask yourself the question who the fuck would want to invest money  in setting up a business on the former airport site when you may have to relocate, losing lots of money,  a couple of years down the line? Nobody in their right mind would want to take this risk. So my conclusion is that the Labour Party, UKIP and the Tories,  by playing cynical political games with Manston Airport in order to get votes,   have ended up blighting  a site with major economic regeneration potential. By doing so  Labour, UKIP and the Tories are directly   responsible for the growth of poverty and deprivation in Thanet.

Because make no mistake the 865 acre former-airport site is absolutely critical to the regeneration of Thanet. Had Labour, UKIP and the Tories been honest and truthful about the airport from the beginning  then  the CPO fiasco would have been dealt with months ago and we would now be  seeing new investment in business, leisure and residential use at the site and benefiting from  desperately needed jobs and training opportunities for local people. Instead the issue of the CPO has been deliberately played out and extended purely because  of the  self-interest of Thanet morally corrupt political establishment. And even after the recent RiverOak debacle  there's still  no end in sight to this pathetic political game playing.

There’s no doubt in my mind that Thanet’s  political establishment have, through their deceitful manipulation of the Manston Airport situation,  seriously  fucked -up the regeneration of the district  and cheated many residents out of a better future. This is why I am forced to write  so many bad new articles. 

Not that I am an expert in these matters, but if  I was Stone Hill Park I would be taking legal advice about suing Thanet Council for an abuse of process which is  improperly impacting upon their plans for site which they legally own.